A friend of mine works for a well known publishing company. One day she asked me for just my name and address. She plugged this into her Lexis-Nexis database and pulled up an amazing ammount of information about me, my parents/family etc. She also told me the first six digits of my social-security number. Just from my name and address! She also was able to correctly identify several banks I do business with.

If you think about it, we all use the LAST four digits of our SSN repeatedly for pins, passwords, all kinds of things. At T-Mobile for example, if you email customer service (over an INSECURE form on their website) they request the last four of your SSN. (!?) Tons of other companies use this information regularly and openly.

The bottom line is that just with someone's name and address you can easily get access to not only their family members, and bank account info, you can easily get the first 5 digits of someone's SSN, which you can then, with not so secret methods, get the last four.